Conventionally, either one of the wafer feeding plate on which a wafer where a plurality of wafer feed components are arranged is placed and the tray feeding plate on which a component feeding tray where a plurality of tray feed components are arranged is placed, of the components to be mounted on a board, is selectively received in such a component feeder, and the wafer feeding plate or the tray feeding plate is discharged to feed the wafer feed components or the tray feed components to the mounting section or the like of the component mounting apparatus (refer to, for example, Japanese unexamined Patent Publication No. 2000-91385).
Moreover, in order to allow the wafer feed components to be fed from the wafer placed on the wafer feeding plate in such a component feeder, it is necessary to expand the wafer that has undergone dicing. Therefore, the component feeder is provided with a device for performing the expanding. It is further necessary to push up the wafer feed components fed from the wafer that has undergone the expanding from under its lower surface to put the components into a state in which they can be taken out. Therefore, the component feeder is also provided with a pushup device that performs the pushup operation.
On the other hand, in order to allow the tray feed components to be fed from the component feeding tray placed on the component feeding plate in the component feeder, it is not necessary to perform the operation of wafer expanding, pushup, or the like.
Therefore, the operation to allow the components to be fed differs depending on when the wafer feeding plate is received in and when the tray feeding plate is received in the component feeder.
Presently, with regard to the component mounting, producing multichip mounting boards produced by mounting various kinds of components on one board has become a main stream. The various kinds of components to be mounted on such a multichip mounting board include numbers of the wafer feed components or the tray feed components. Moreover, it is earnestly demanded to improve the productivity of the production of such multichip mounting boards on the other hand.